Thursday, September 21, 2023

Dutch and Flemish Art Expertise, Syracuse University Football, Google, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 21, 2023

Dutch and Flemish Art Expertise, Syracuse University Football, Google, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CODART: Curators’ Specializations Now Available on the CODART Website. “In the curators overview, you will find a new filter that allows you to select from various topics in terms of geographical regions, periods, media, themes and artists. Please note that only topics related to Dutch and Flemish art from about 1350 to 1750 are included. For example, if one selects the region of Spain, curators specializing in northern artists who were active in Spain will be presented, not curators specializing in Spanish artists.”

Syracuse University: University Football Films Collection Now Available Online. “Of the 430 films digitized from the larger Syracuse University Audiovisual Collection, nearly 400 are now available through SU Digital Collections, the Libraries’ digital library portal. The content forms the core of the new Syracuse University Football Films Collection, a virtual collection created for the digital library where materials can be searched by date, keyword and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Bard Gets a ‘Google It’ Button and We’re Back at Square One, Folks . “During a press briefing on Tuesday, Google Bard vice president of engineering Amar Subramanya said one of the challenges with large language models is that they oftentimes present inaccurate information, confidently. So, to fix this issue of what he described as ‘the hallucination problem’, Google is sticking a ‘Google It’ button within Bard. Why….why not just bypass the middle bot and go straight to Google?”

TechCrunch: X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system will now let contributors consider opposing viewpoints . “X (formerly Twitter) this week changed how its crowdsourced fact-checking Community Notes feature works. In the new design, users will be able to review all the notes that have been proposed as annotations to an X post, rather than just the one note they’re currently reviewing. In other words, it will allow contributors to consider other notes before leaving their rating — and possibly, could convince them to change their mind.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Tech Fears Are Showing Up on Picket Lines. “Unions aren’t just fighting for an inflation-beating wage boost. They also are campaigning for job security at a time when workers increasingly fear that shifts to new technologies, like electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, threaten their job, and tech bosses themselves say this gloomy outlook is inevitable.”

Mashable: How social media in the classroom is burning teachers out. “[Sari Beth] Rosenberg noticed the shift about a decade ago. Her students’ attention span seemed shorter, and the teens became more prone to distraction. Conflicts over being excluded or bullied via social media became routine. Students brought that tension into the classroom and hallways. Rosenberg noticed, through observation and conversation, how social media wore down her students’ mental health.”

Hell Gate: The TikTok NPC Streamers of SoHo . “People attuned to the summer’s internet fads would have known what the brothers were doing—the Flints are NPC streamers, a genre in which a content creator will mimic a non-player character in a video game. During their livestreams, these content creators idle like a background villager in an Elder Scrolls town would, until a viewer interacts with them by throwing them a virtual token via TikTok’s reward system, in which case they’ll perform a line of dialogue and one of the animations they’ve come up with for their character.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google launches last-ditch effort to overturn $2.6 billion EU antitrust fine. “Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday made a last-ditch effort at Europe’s top court to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust fine imposed for market abuse related to its shopping service, saying that regulators failed to show that its practices were anti-competitive.”

Wall Street Journal: People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time. “Accounts on the platform are posting episodes of TV shows and full-length films in bite-sized clips that users can watch in a long continuous string. If you search for ‘Barbie,’ odds are, you’ll be inundated with fan videos and chatter, and won’t see any of the clips. But TikTok’s algorithms might promote a 90-second snippet of the movie on users’ For You pages, with a cryptic title like Part 8. Once users watch a few clips, more and more might turn up.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

HackADay: Preserving Floppy Disks . “Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.”

Axios: Most U.S. adults don’t believe benefits of AI outweigh the risks, new survey finds. “54% of the 2,063 adults in a Mitre-Harris Poll survey in July said they were more concerned about the risks of AI than they were excited about the potential benefits. At the same time, 39% of adults said they believed today’s AI technologies are safe and secure — down 9 points from the previous survey in November 2022.”

Yahoo Finance: Americans spent $71B on social media impulse buys: Survey. “Americans are spending a lot of money on social media. According to a new Bankrate survey, 48% of social media users have made an impulse purchase, spending a whopping $71 billion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 57% of buyers regretted at least one purchase.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.



September 21, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Wednesday, September 20, 2023

African-American Funeral Programs, Google Domains, TikTok, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023

African-American Funeral Programs, Google Domains, TikTok, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Buffalo News: Newly digitized funeral program collection unveiled at Merriweather library. “Interest in genealogical research has increased with new technological innovations, including online databases, but members of the Buffalo Genealogical Society of the African Diaspora long ago discovered the value of African American funeral programs – in all their low-tech glory – as rich sources of biographical information for those working on their family trees. The society recently teamed with the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, University at Buffalo and Western New York Library Resources Council to digitize a community resource that it created called the Funeral Collection project.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Google Domains halts registrations as it waits for the Google Grim Reaper. “Google Domains has registered its last domain. Google announced in July that the service was getting shut down and that it had struck a deal with Squarespace to sell off the existing customer base. Part of that transition process means winding down the existing Google Domains functionality. 9to5Google was the first site to notice that you can no longer buy a domain through the service while it waits for the Google Grim Reaper to arrive.”

TechCrunch: TikTok debuts new tools and technology to label AI content. “As more creators turn to AI for their artistic expression, there’s also a broader push for transparency around when AI was involved in content creation. To address this concern, TikTok announced today it will launch a new tool that will allow creators to label their AI-generated content and will begin testing other ways to label AI-generated content automatically.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeTechEasier: 9 Tools to Convert and Save WEBP Files to JPG . “WEBP is a file extension developed by Google to reduce the size of an image without needing to sacrifice image quality. Recently, many websites have been making use of the WEBP image format, but it’s still not natively supported by many image editors, including older versions of Photoshop or web content management systems, such as WordPress. The solution to this is to convert your WEBP image to JPG. This list includes some of the best tools to convert and save WEBP files to JPG.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Business Insider: New layoffs at Twitter hit trust and safety workers even as advertisers worry about toxic speech. “The cuts happened the first week of September, according to two people familiar with the company, one of the first targeted layoffs since he shrunk operations earlier this year. While this layoff only affected a handful of people, five to 10, it was focused entirely on workers in trust and safety.”

BBC: How will museums of tomorrow tell the Covid pandemic story?. “Covid’s arrival in early 2020 threw organisations and businesses into turmoil. But while most workers grappled with furlough, social distancing and working from home, a small band of museum officers sensed history was in the making. This is one museum service’s story of trying to collect items in real-time to capture the pandemic story for future generations.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CoinDesk: NFL Quarterback Trevor Lawrence and 2 YouTube Influencers Settle FTX Case . “As Sam Bankman-Fried prepares for a trial defense in Manhattan next month, three celebrity promoters of his failed FTX cryptocurrency exchange have opted to settle the case, according to court filings. NFL team Jacksonville Jaguars’ quarterback Trevor Lawrence and YouTube influencers Kevin Paffrath and Tom Nash agreed to settle the case on undisclosed terms. The final court order acknowledging the settlement and removing them from the case is awaiting a sign-off from U.S. Judge K. Michael Moore.”

Bar and Bench (India): X Corp (Twitter) case: Karnataka High Court suggests that government bring in minimum age for using social media. “The Karnataka High Court today suggested that the Central government consider setting a minimum age for using social media so that children are prevented from using it. A bench of Justices G Narender and Vijaykumar A Patil made the suggestion while dwelling upon the dangers of exposing children to social media.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: The Google Trial Is Going to Rewrite Our Future. “The Google antitrust trial, which began last week, is ostensibly focused on the past — on a series of deals that Google made with other companies over the past two decades. The prosecution in the case, U.S. et al. v. Google, contends that Google illegally spent billions of dollars paying off Samsung and Apple to prevent anyone else from gaining a foothold in the market for online search.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: Turning the tide: Ghana’s innovative approach to tackle marine plastic pollution with citizen science. “Working with IIASA researchers, Ghana has adopted a citizen science approach to addressing the problem of plastic pollution in marine environments, becoming the first country to integrate this type of data on marine plastic litter into its official monitoring and reporting processes. A new study presents this innovative approach on Ghana’s citizen science journey and offers a pathway that can potentially be adopted in other countries.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.



September 21, 2023 at 12:08AM
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How To Create a Mastodon Account for Your WordPress Blog In Five Minutes

How To Create a Mastodon Account for Your WordPress Blog In Five Minutes
By ResearchBuzz

I have given up trying to figure out Elon Musk’s deal. Several years ago he speculated that we’re living in a simulation. If he truly believes that, then my best guess is that he thinks the simulation is of Wreck-It Ralph. At any rate, the latest incomprehensible decision is the implementation of mandatory subscription fees, which as you might imagine has accelerated the continuing exodus from Twitter.

I really like Mastodon. The API is excellent and I find the process of creating apps for searching and browsing most instructional. I’m not the only one building tools for Mastodon (it has a thread reader now!) — in fact, I think if you tried Mastodon in November of last year and didn’t enjoy it, you’d find it a much different experience now.

Happily, if you have a WordPress blog, you can start a Mastodon account using a WordPress plugin. The plugin will connect your WordPress blog to the fediverse (a collection of decentralized networks where Mastodon resides) and automatically publish your posts on Mastodon. The plugin will also allow you to track how many people are following that account. Best of all, installing this plugin will take less than five minutes. If you’ve been thinking about joining Mastodon, this is a good way to get your feet wet while you’re exploring the options around setting up a personal account.

In this walkthrough, I’ll install the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress on RB Firehose, the blog which indexes the individual articles which make up the ResearchBuzz digest newsletter.

Please note: If you’ve done a lot of SEO tweaking you may have to take a further step or two. Furthermore, if you’re running a blog with several authors, your installation process will be slightly different.

1. Installing the ActivityPub Plugin

What’s ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a networking protocol used by many decentralized social networks, including Mastodon. You can learn more about it here. This plugin will actually make your blog accessible to several social networks in the fediverse, but for the purpose of this article we’re focusing on Mastodon.

From the Plugins section of your WordPress site, search for ActivityPub. You’re looking for “ActivityPub By Matthias Pfefferle & Automattic·”

A screenshot of a search of WordPress plugins, showing the ActivityPub plugin result coming first.

 

If you’re using author profiles or you’ve redirected your author pages for SEO purposes, please be sure to read the additional instructions on the plugin page. You also have the option to create a single Mastodon account for your blog instead of creating individual author accounts. We’ll be creating a single account in this article. If everything looks good go ahead and install the plugin. After it’s installed, you’ll find the settings under Settings -> ActivityPub.

2. Setting Up the Plugin

Your settings page starts by showing you your Mastodon user address and profile URL.

A screenshot of the ActivityPub plugin settings page. The most immediate information are the user address and user profile URL.

The username part is the part that a Mastodon user would paste into a search box in their instance to follow your blog. The icon comes from the author profile, which is why the avatar is a little cartoon me.

A screenshot of a Mastodon search box showing a search result for researchbuzz@rbfirehose.com .

 

I do not like this. I want to create a Mastodon account about the blog, not about me. So I will click on the Settings tab at the top of this page to change it. This page has several sections so let’s take them one at a time.

The first part of the settings lets you specify whether you want to set the account by blog authors or for the blog itself.  If you choose that you want a single account for the blog itself, you’ll be able to change the account name. Here I’ve set up a single account called researchbuzz_firehose.

A screenshot of the Profiles setting of the ActivityPub plugin. In this case I've ticked the "enable blog" button instead of the "enable authors" button, and I've set my profile ID to researchbuzz_firehose@rbfirehose.com .

The second part specifies how you want to publish your content on Mastodon and which items you want to publish (posts/pages/attachments.) There’s also a server setting here but it’s a bit outside the scope of this article. Click the Save Changes button when you’re done.

A screenshot showing the second set of options for the ActivityPub plugin. The top is the Post content options, where you can choose whether to post just a title and link, an excerpt, all content, or a custom combination. Underneath that you can specify a maximum number of images to include (default is 3). You can also specify the supported post types and specify whether or not you want to include hashtags.

Once you’ve clicked that button and the page refreshes, you’ll see the settings page has a new page called Followers. This is the tab that will show you the people on Mastodon who are following your blog. Of course I don’t have any followers at the moment, but I’ll follow the blog from my own Mastodon account. A search of the new user name finds my account without the cartoon me. (I’m not sure where the blog avatar is pulled from, if anywhere, if anybody knows please let me know.) I’ll follow it.

 

Now when I look on my followers tab I see one follower! Yay!

A screenshot of the ActivityPub "followers" tab with one sad little follower - me. lol

To see if this is working, I’ll do a test post on ResearchBuzz Firehose.

A very basic post on ResearchBuzz Firehose with the title reading "This is a test of the ActivityPub Plugin" and the body reading "I'm testing it and writing an article about installing it. Won't be a moment, carry on."

Did this post appear on my Mastodon account? Yes it did!

The ResearchBuzz Firehose post, successfully appearing on Mastodon.

 

And that’s all there is to it! If you want to create a basic Mastodon account for your blog all you need is the ActivityPub plugin and a few minutes. It’s up to you to promote your site in order to get followers, of course, but congratulations! You have taken your first step into the fediverse by getting your blog on Mastodon.



September 20, 2023 at 05:39PM
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State Court Report, FOIA Log Explorer, LGBTQ Delaware, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023

State Court Report, FOIA Log Explorer, LGBTQ Delaware, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brennan Center for Justice: Brennan Center Launches State Court Report, Website Dedicated to State Constitutions and Courts. “Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law launched State Court Report, a nonpartisan website devoted to state constitutions and courts. … State Court Report also offers a database of decisions and briefs from 550 significant state supreme court cases since 2021 across the fifty states, as well as materials from major pending cases.”

MuckRock: Browse thousands of additional FOIA requests with the new FOIA Log Explorer. “MuckRock’s users have already shared almost 90,000 public requests you can search, browse, follow or refile, but that is still just a small segment of the broader world of all Freedom of Information requests. The FOIA Log Explorer expands that view by importing data on thousands of requests from dozens of agencies at the state, local and federal level, making it easier to search through and see what kinds of materials agencies are and are not releasing, as well as helping you craft more targeted requests of your own.”

State of Delaware: Celebrate Delaware’s LGBTQ+ history with a new online resource. “This September, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs is proud to offer a sneak-peek introduction to the LGBTQ+ History of Delaware: We Have Always Been Here project!”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: YouTube suspends Russell Brand from advert income. “YouTube has suspended Russell Brand’s channels from making money from adverts for ‘violating’ its ‘creator responsibility policy’. The video platform said it was taking action ‘to protect’ its users. It comes after the Metropolitan Police received a report of an alleged sexual assault in 2003, in the wake of further allegations about the star.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Reddit Suck Less on Your Phone. “IT’S BEEN A few months since Reddit shut down the vast majority of third-party clients, and the protests have mostly died down. But using Reddit on mobile is a nightmare—it’s slow, riddled with prompts, and constantly asks if you want notifications. … There is one simple workaround: Use the web version instead. But Reddit also goes out of its way to make this annoying: There are constant pop-ups encouraging you to install the Reddit app, and they take up half the screen. Let’s talk about how to avoid these pop-ups on Apple devices and then go over a few third-party apps—including one still working on Android.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Chortle: Velvet Onion vanishes. “Alternative comedy website The Velvet Onion has disappeared from the internet. The site covered the scene from 2010 to 2018 – but now even the cost of maintaining its archive as a permanent presence has proved too much for founder Didymus Holmes.”

CNBC: Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is moving to monthly subscription fees and has 550 million users. “Elon Musk discussed his plans for Twitter, now called X, on Monday during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, Musk said the social network is ‘moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system’ in order to combat ‘vast armies of bots.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Sued by FTX. “”On Monday, FTX filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware accusing Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, longtime Stanford law professors, of using their ‘access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves.’ The lawsuit seeks to claw back millions of dollars the couple received from their son.”

The Register: Sonos secures a victory in audio patent fight against Google . “The years-long legal drama resulting from a brief fling between Google and smart speaker maker Sonos has resulted in another loss for the Chocolate Factory, which had its claims of copyright infringement tossed out by a US International Trade Commission (ITC) judge Friday.”

Ars Technica: How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse. “A security company is calling out a feature in Google’s authenticator app that it says made a recent internal network breach much worse. Retool, which helps customers secure their software development platforms, made the criticism on Wednesday in a post disclosing a compromise of its customer support system. The breach gave the attackers responsible access to the accounts of 27 customers, all in the cryptocurrency industry.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

George Washington University: Social Media May Be Used to Combat COVID Vaccine Hesitancy in Nigeria. “A social media campaign launched in 2022 helped encourage some Nigerians to roll up their sleeves for a COVID vaccine, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. ‘Our research suggests that a social media campaign can reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase the vaccination rates in Nigeria and possibly other low-income countries,’ said Doug Evans, the lead author of the paper and a professor of prevention and community health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.”

The Register: ChatGPT’s odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip . “ChatGPT, OpenAI’s fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.



September 20, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Washington Respiratory Health, T2, Google Play, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023

Washington Respiratory Health, T2, Google Play, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

KNDU: New respiratory illness dashboard launches to monitor numbers across Washington. “A new Respiratory Illness Data Dashboard from the Department of Health will allow Washington residents to track COVID-19, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) activity by region across the state.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Twitter/X rival T2 rebrands as ‘Pebble,’ saying the old name was never meant to be permanent . “An X challenger didn’t hide its ambitions to take on the social network formerly known as Twitter when it dubbed itself T2 at launch, but now that name — one which indicates a desire to build a Twitter clone — is no more. The company announced on its platform that the would-be X rival will now be called ‘Pebble.'” “Like the smartwatch?” said my not-quite-keeping-up memory.

Android Police: The Play Store rolls out auto app archiving option for everyone. “Auto archiving was previously only available when you were already running low on storage, with a prompt appearing asking you if you’d like to turn the option on to save some space. As spotted by Mishaal Rahman on X (formerly Twitter) and AssembleDebug on Telegram, the auto archive option is rolling out to a lot more people.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Interview Magazine: Meet Mark Kerrigan, the Man Who Finds Famous People. “As the managing director of Celebrity Service, the online database that most magazines use to find the details of any talent they’re looking to feature, Mark has worked for nearly three decades making the most inaccessible people a little more accessible. We thanked him for his service with some sangria at Sevilla, where he arrived with a briefcase of pre-internet Celebrity Service artifacts, and some stories about his years of seeking out the stars.”

Bloomberg: D Billions Is Creating a YouTube Kids’ Entertainment Empire in Kyrgyzstan. “If you have young children, there’s a good chance they have consumed some of the D Billions videos on YouTube. The videos feature four main characters — Cha-Cha, Boom-Boom, Lya-Lya and Chicky — who dress in primary colors and sing silly songs. One goal of the music is to teach kids words in different languages. Another is to keep them entertained and clicking on more and more videos.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Popular Science: Patch a potential privacy risk by deleting your ancient LiveJournal. “I looked into ways to back up LiveJournal posts. It wasn’t straightforward. At all. LiveJournal offers an official exporting tool, but it can only export one month’s worth of posts at a time, which is basically useless. I tried using Wget to scrape old entries, but this backfired hilariously: LiveJournal blocked my IP address. After a lot of research, I figured out that using WordPress is the best way to back up your old LiveJournal posts. Of course, if you have no interest in saving anything and just want to delete your LiveJournal account, you can skip straight to that section below.”

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: Lindemann family returns 33 long-sought ancient statues to Cambodia. “Billionaire George Lindemann showcased his collection of Khmer treasures and passed them on to his children. But investigations by ICIJ and others traced many of his prized antiquities back to pillaged sacred sites.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: How to Tell if Your A.I. Is Conscious. “In a new report, scientists offer a list of measurable qualities that might indicate the presence of some presence in a machine.”

UNESCO: UNESCO and WMF join Forces to inventory the Jewish Heritage Worldwide. “UNESCO and World Monuments Fund (WMF) will establish a partnership aimed at accelerating the documentation of Jewish cultural heritage worldwide and better protecting these sites. The partnership will initially run for five years. It will benefit from an initial investment of $1 million USD and will be open to external funding.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ubergizmo: A Canadian Camera Was Able To Capture 4.8 Million Frames Per Second Cost-Effectively. “An innovative camera capable of capturing an astounding 4.8 million frames per second has been developed by Canadian scientists. What sets this camera apart from its commercial counterparts is not just its remarkable speed but also its significantly lower cost, thanks to the utilization of off-the-shelf components. This achievement is detailed in a study published in the journal Optica.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.



September 20, 2023 at 12:32AM
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Tracking Shrinkflation, Wolfram Language, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023

Tracking Shrinkflation, Wolfram Language, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Boing Boing: Shrinkflation database tracks diminishing size of food products. “The Shrinkflation Tracker, by Sam Lader, is on a mission to stop manufacturers quietly putting less food inside product packaging without a corresponding fall in price to consumers. The practice is out of control, so much so that even major retailers are beginning to warn customers against lest they suspect complicity in the practice.” The listings are UK and Ireland-focused at the moment.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Creamy or Crunchy: Visualizing Food Protein Structures in Wolfram Language. “Explore protein structures with the new Wolfram ProteinVisualization paclet and the BioMoleculePlot3D resource function. Designed for researchers, educators and all structural biology enthusiasts, the paclet offers an immersive experience for viewing the intricate structures of biomolecules, including proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes.”

TechCrunch: X launches account verification based on government ID. “X, formerly Twitter, has launched government ID-based account verification for paid users to prevent impersonation and give them benefits such as ‘prioritized support.'”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Sure Important Emails Don’t End Up in Spam. “It’s important to regularly check the contents of your spam folder, and to set up a list of safe senders. So, for example, you might put your kid’s school on there, or your key contacts from work, or your significant other. Email sent from these addresses will never be canned, so you don’t have to worry that something has slipped past you. These lists can be configured in just about every email app, and they are easy to set up. Here’s how.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BBC: Bovington: Tank museum videos become global social media hit. “A museum tucked away in rural Dorset has described how tank enthusiasts from around the world have made it an unlikely YouTube success. The Tank Museum in Bovington has more than 100 million views on its channel. This means it reaches a greater audience on the video sharing platform than the likes of the Louvre in Paris and the Met in New York.”

New York Times: ‘One of the Most Hated People in the World’: Sam Bankman-Fried’s 250 Pages of Justifications. “In a draft of his unsent posts, which he formatted as a series of tweets spanning roughly 70 typed pages, he criticized some of his closest colleagues, interspersing his arguments with photos from his high school years and stock images of popcorn and a garden maze. Every few pages, a key moment in the narrative is accompanied with a link to a music video by Alicia Keys, Katy Perry or Rihanna.”

Ars Technica: Funky AI-generated spiraling medieval village captivates social media. “On Sunday, a Reddit user named ‘Ugleh’ posted an AI-generated image of a spiral-shaped medieval village that rapidly gained attention on social media for its remarkable geometric qualities. Follow-up posts garnered even more praise, including a tweet with over 145,000 likes. Ugleh created the images using Stable Diffusion and a guidance technique called ControlNet.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Harvard Gazette: So what exactly is Google accused of?. “Digital economy expert says much of antitrust case comes down to how much influence search giant wields on default setting on devices like phones, PCs.”

Bleeping Computer: TikTok flooded by ‘Elon Musk’ cryptocurrency giveaway scams. “TikTok is flooded by a surge of fake cryptocurrency giveaways posted to the video-sharing platform, with almost all of the videos pretending to be themes based on Elon Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX.”

Techdirt: A Trio Of Failed Lawsuits Trying To Sue Websites For Moderating Content. “Why do people still file these lawsuits? For years now, we see lawsuits filed against websites over their content moderation decisions, despite Section 230 barring them (and the 1st Amendment rights of the platform backing that up). These lawsuits always fail.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: I quit Facebook and Twitter cold turkey – and I barely know myself. “The thing that perhaps I hated most was the capacity – no, the encouragement! – the platform gave people to confect and cultivate parallel, false lives. The perfect marriages. The beautiful, oh-so thoughtfully, eclectically curated homes with ocean- or bucolic bush-outlooks. The perfectly adjusted children and their prodigious A+ results, and their expertise with anything – ball, bat, violin – they took to hand. The holidays, replete with glimpses of the pointy-end cabin and club lounge.”

Semafor: The Princeton researchers calling out ‘AI snake oil’. “In July, a new study about ChatGPT started going viral on social media, which seemed to validate growing suspicions about how the chatbot had gotten “dumber” over time. As often happens in these circumstances, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor stepped in as the voices of reason. The Princeton computer science professor and Ph.D candidate, respectively, are the authors of the popular newsletter and soon-to-be book AI Snake Oil, which exists to ‘dispel hype, remove misconceptions, and clarify the limits of AI.'” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.



September 19, 2023 at 05:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/jGem2cZ

Monday, September 18, 2023

How Buildings Use Energy, Louisiana Government Salaries, WordPress ActivityPub, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2023

How Buildings Use Energy, Louisiana Government Salaries, WordPress ActivityPub, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NREL:
NREL Researchers Reveal How Buildings Across United States Do—and Could—Use Energy
. “Buildings are responsible for 40% of total energy use in the United States, including 75% of all electricity use and 35% of the nation’s carbon emissions….To facilitate decarbonization of the U.S. building stock, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have created a new, meticulously researched data set that details how buildings do—and could—use energy. This data set, called the End-Use Load Profiles, reveals the massive climate impacts that improvements to the U.S. building stock could have.”

Louisiana Illuminator: Louisiana government salary database is finally live. “The state of Louisiana has made a searchable database of state employee salary information publicly available. The database is available on the state’s financial transparency website… It includes all executive branch salary information but does not yet include salaried higher education employees.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon. “In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms. Now, the company is announcing ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites.”

Search Engine Land: TikTok quietly adds Wikipedia snippets to its search results. “TikTok now serves Wikipedia snippets in some of its search results. This is the first time that the platform has offered its users results from the wider web as historically, it exclusively featured its own content in SERPs.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 10 Lightweight Linux Distributions to Give Your Old PC New Life. “Old PCs can’t cope with the demands of modern operating systems and software. While upgrading hardware such as memory can help, the better solution is a lightweight operating system. Many Linux distros are designed to be lightweight, with versions of Linux under 500MB and even under 100MB available. If you’re looking for a resource-light operating system for your PC, try these compact, lightweight Linux distros.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Troy University: Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum receives grant to create new mobile app. “A grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services will enable Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum to create a mobile app that will engage its visitors, especially the large numbers of school children who tour the museum each year on field trips.”

Futurism: Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player “Useless”. “Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic. But in an unhinged twist on what was otherwise a somber news story, Microsoft’s MSN news portal published a garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as ‘useless’ in its headline.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Greater Manchester Police officers’ details hacked in cyber attack. “Police officers’ personal details have been hacked after a company was targeted in a cyber attack. The firm in Stockport, which makes ID cards, holds information on various UK organisations including some of the staff employed by Greater Manchester Police (GMP). The force confirmed it was aware of the ransomware attack.”

WIRED: China-Linked Hackers Breached a Power Grid—Again. “Today, researchers on the Threat Hunter Team at Broadcom-owned security firm Symantec revealed that a Chinese hacker group with connections to APT41, which Symantec is calling RedFly, breached the computer network of a national power grid in an Asian country—though Symantec has declined to name which country was targeted. The breach began in February of this year and persisted for at least six months as the hackers expanded their foothold throughout the IT network of the country’s national electric utility, though it’s not clear how close the hackers came to gaining the ability to disrupt power generation or transmission.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Bill Willingham: Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain. “As of now, 15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time. It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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September 19, 2023 at 12:30AM
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